When At First You Practice To Deceive-Max Ophuls’ The Earrings Of Madame de… (1953)

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

The Earrings Of Madame de, starring Charles Boyer, Daniele Darrieux, Vittorio Desica, directed by Max Ophuls, 1953

There are plenty of things that films, especially older films can do to portray various aspects of the lives of people who have inhabited this wicked old world. The film under review, Max Ophuls’ The Earrings of Madame de… is almost a perfect expression of the Belle Epoque, the period of peace and stability for the upper crust before the ugly storm of World War I washed away all such illusions that the industrial age would bring unencumbered  progress and benefits to the Western world. To show rather graphically how the ill-thought out consequences of the moral decay of the period would bring the flower of the European youth to its knees before that conflict was over. At another level this film, for those who want to shy away from the political storms, represents an exceptional example of a master filmmaker at work using one simple thread to tell his story, to tell of the consequences of what the headline to this review points out-when you first practice to deceive-watch out for the blowback.   

For those who want to accept the film for its latter view here is how things came to such a nasty personal end. Madame de (and the beauty of this film other than as an example of the decadent French aristocracy is we never learn, never need to learn really the rest of Madame’s surname-a brilliant stroke), played by Daniele Darrieux, a big star of the French cinema in the post-World War II period, a flighty and self-indulgent wife of a count and General in the French Army, played by Charles Boyer, in the post-Paris Commune period was in hock up to her pretty eyebrows to a party (or parties) unknown. To get out from under dear Madame had hocked an expensive pair of earrings that the good General had given her as a heartfelt wedding gift. From there it is a question of following the bouncing ball, following the trail of the earrings and what they mean to the receivers in various contexts.        

Obviously to Madame they did not mean much in that stage of her marriage (she had plenty of other hock-able goods around her boudoir)  since she hocked them and then made up an outrageous story about losing them at the opera. Wrong move. Once the “theft” became public the jeweler who Madame hocked the jewels to got cold feet and sold them to the stiff upper-lipped general a second time. The General, in turn, used them as bait in his rush to get rid of an inconvenient mistress that he had tired of whom he was sending off to Turkey. She, in turn, hocked then when she got in over her head in gambling debts in some Kasbah casino. They were subsequently purchased by a Baron, played by Vittorio DeSica, who was on the way to Paris to take up a diplomatic post. Are you still with me?   

This is where things got dicey. The Baron met and was enchanted by Madame who used every coquettish trick in the book to entice him, and to discard him like an old shoe. Eventually they do become lovers and as a token of that love the kindly Baron gives Madame, you guessed it, the earrings. Problem: she can’t wear the things as a sign of her love for the Baron since the game would be up with the General. So the hair-brained Madame “finds” the missing jewels. Oops. The general already suspicious took the “found” jewels from Madame and confronted the Baron with the truth of Madame’s lies. Get this though. He wanted the Baron to sell them to the now obviously seriously wealthy jeweler so he could buy them a third time and present them yet again to Madame. Meanwhile the Baron seeing what the real picture was bowed, out of the scene. All very civilized, civilized indeed.         

Done, right. Are you kidding. The irate General gave them to Madame but told her to give them to a niece who has just given birth to a child. She, the niece, in turn, sold those freaking earrings to the now over the top rich jeweler to pay off hubby’s debts. The reckless if wealthy jeweler tried to sell them to the General a fourth time but he balked on this one. Madame stepped up to purchase them though after hocking some goods that she could have hocked to begin with. That purchase, that final purchase (at least in the film) was the tripping point for the General knowing that Madame was purchasing the jewels back out of devotion to the Baron. The General decided to confront the Baron with his indiscretions with Madame, with his wife. Such matters of honor were then settled in a very civilized way-divorce court. No, no on the field of honor among gentlemen-a duel. The Baron was doomed but would not back down. As a token trying to save the Baron through some miracle Madame placed the earring as a donation at her church. No go. The Baron caught the westbound train, was killed by the General’s single well-placed bullet. Madame, well, Madame, began to fall apart as usual when any slight or grand thing laid her low. A great film which you really must watch when you get a chance. And remember the moral too.       

The Struggle Continues...Supporter The Military Resisters-Support The G.I. Project   

 

By Frank Jackman

The late Peter Paul Markin had gotten “religion” on the questions of war and peace the hard way. Had before that baptism accepted half-knowingly (his term) against his better judgment induction into the Army when his “friends and neighbors” at his local draft board in North Adamsville called him up for military service back in hard-shell hell-hole Vietnam War days when the country was coming asunder, was bleeding from all pores around 1968. Markin had had some qualms about going into the service not only because the reasoning given by the government and its civilian hangers-on for the tremendous waste of human and material resources had long seemed preposterous but because he had an abstract idea that war was bad, bad for individuals, bad for countries, bad for civilization in the late 20^th century. Was a half-assed pacifist if he had though deeply about the question, which he had not.

But everything in his blessed forsaken scatter-shot life pushed and pushed hard against his joining the ranks of the draft resisters whom he would hear about and see every day then as he passed on his truck route which allowed him to pay his way through college the Boston sanctuary for that cohort, the Arlington Street Church. Markin had assumed that since he was not a Quaker, Shaker, Mennonite, Brethren of the Common Life adherent but rather a bloody high-nosed Roman Catholic with their slimy “just war” theory that seemed to justify every American war courtesy of their leading American Cardinal, France Spellman, that he could not qualify for conscientious objector status on that basis. And at the time that he entered the Army that was probably true even if he had attempted to do so. Later, as happened with his friend, Jack Callahan, he could at least made the case based on the common Catholic upbringing.  Right then though he was not a total objector to war but only of what he saw in front of him, the unjustness of the Vietnam War.

That was not the least of his situation though. That half-knowingly mentioned above had been overridden by his whole college Joe lifestyle where he was more interested in sex, drink, and rock and roll (the drugs would not come until later), more interested in bedding women than thinking through what he half-knew would be his fate once he graduated from college as the war slowly dragged on and his number was coming up. Moreover there was not one damn thing in his background that would have given pause about his future course. A son of the working-class, really even lower than that the working poor a notch below, there was nobody if he had bothered to seek some support for resistance who would have done so. Certainly not his quiet but proud ex-World War II Marine father, not his mother whose brother was a rising career Army senior NCO, not his older brothers who had signed up as a way to get out of hell-hole North Adamsville, and certainly not his friends from high school half of whom had enlisted and a couple from his street who had been killed in action over there. So no way was an Acre boy with the years of Acre mentality cast like iron in his head about servicing if called going to tip the cart that way toward straight out resistance.         

Maybe he should have, at least according to guys he met in college like Brad Fox and Fritz Tylor, or guys who he met on the hitchhike road going west like Josh Breslin and Captain Crunch (his moniker not real name which Josh could not remember). The way they heard the story from Markin after he got out of the Army, after he had done his hell-hole thirteen months in Vietnam as an infantryman, twice wounded, and after he had come back to the “real” world was that on about the third day in basis training down in Fort Jackson in South Carolina he knew that he had made a mistake by accepting induction. But maybe there was some fate-driven reason, maybe as he received training as an infantryman and he and a group of other trainees talked about but did not refuse to take machine-gun training, maybe once he received orders for Vietnam and maybe once he got “in-country” he sensed that something had gone wrong in his short, sweet life but he never attempted to get any help, put in any applications, sought any relief from what was to finally crack him. That, despite tons of barracks anti-war blather on his part from Fort Jackson to Danang.     

Here’s the reason though why the late Peter Paul Markin’s story accompanies this information about G.I. rights even for those who nowadays enter the military voluntarily, as voluntarily as any such decision can be without direct governmental coercion. Markin, and this part is from Josh Breslin the guy he was closest to toward the end, the guy who had last seen him in the States before that fateful trip to Mexico, to Sonora when it all fell apart one day, had a very difficult time coming back to what all the returnees called the “real” world after Vietnam service. Had drifted to drug, sex and rock and roll out on the West Coast where Josh had first met him in San Francisco until he tired of that, had started to have some bad nights.

Despite the bad nights though he did have a real talent for writing, for journalism. Got caught up in writing a series about what would be later called the “brothers under the bridge” about guys like him down in Southern California who could not adjust to the real world after ‘Nam and had tried to keep body and soul together by banding together in the arroyos, along the railroad tracks and under the bridges and creating what would today be called a “safe space.”

Markin’s demons though were never far from the surface. Got worse when he sensed that the great wash that had come over the land during the counter-cultural 1960s that he had just caught the tail-end had run its course, had hit ebb tide. Then in the mid-1970s to relieve whatever inner pains were disturbing him he immersed himself in the cocaine culture that was just rearing its head in the States. That addiction would lead him into the drug trade, would eventually lead him as if by the fateful numbers to sunny Mexico, to lovely Sonora way where he met his end. Josh never found out all the details about Markin’s end although a few friends had raised money to send a detective down to investigate. Apparently Markin got mixed up with some local bad boys in the drug trade. Tried to cut corners, or cut into their market. One day he was found in a dusty back street with two slugs in his head. He lies down there in some unknown potter’s field mourned, moaned and missed until this very day.  

Strange Fruit, Indeed-Fritz Lang’s Fury (1936)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Fury, starring Spencer Tracy, Sylvia Sidney, directed by the legendary director Fritz Lang, M-G-M, 1936

Sure plenty of black and white romance, romantic comedy and detective classics came out of the 1930s but given the hard-pressed times, the Great Depression times, there were many social commentary dramas as well ranging from exposing prison conditions to the plight of migrant workers to the plight of abandoned inner city kids. And in the mix M-G-M through the good offices of Joseph Mankiewicz came this very raw rough and ready look at lynch law “justice” in the film under review famed director Fritz Lang’s Fury. This look, the look of small town lynch law “justice” against a convenient stranger, not the look of what was really happening in America, the systematic lynching of mostly black men, the “strange fruit” of the headline as Billie Holiday sang it, but a very evocative look at mob mentality nevertheless.            

The story line is pretty simple. An average 1930s Joe, Joe Wilson, played by a frenetic Spencer Tracy, had cobbled his pennies together after a long struggle in order to go meet and marry his sweetie, an average Katherine, Katherine Grant, played by Sylvia Sidney, living at some distance from him. Along the way Joe was stopped as a “person of interest” by a small town deputy sheriff. The town had been at the time in an uproar over the kidnapping of a child. Joe was made to fit the bill for the heinous crime on the basis of very airy evidence, stuff that wouldn’t hold up in any court outside the town’s jurisdiction. It never got that far, Joe was never meant to get that fair trial in order to sort out the evidence because the town people became subject to a collective psychosis, mob rule. Burned down the jail in their frenzy assuming that their average Joe was killed in the flames.   

Of course the unlawful actions in this case got the D.A. in a frenzy seeking real justice by the book by indicting as many of the perpetrators as possible, eventually rounding up 22 of the suspected felons. Problem: problem in small town or big is that nobody wanted to “snitch” on their fellows. Still the D.A. was ready to lower the boom once he got newsreel footage and could identify the parties to the mayhem.      

Everything looked like curtains for the 22 but then their diligent defense attorney pointed out that the state had no proof that Joe had been killed. Bingo. This is where the film gets a little odd. See Joe had actually survived the fire, was pulling the strings, had decided along with his irate brothers from Chi town in tow to get revenge on the small town mob and would have had the frame all set except, well, except his sweetie Katherine found out he was not dead. She tried, tried and tried really, to get him to go out into the open and prevent another injustice (or at least not have the 22 up on murder charges whatever other crimes they actually did commit). Interesting film if the plotline made the subject under discussion, lynching and mob rule, a little awry.        

Once Again -Down At Duke’s Place-With Duke Ellington In Mind

 

 

From The Pen Of Bart Webber  

One night Sam Eaton was talking on his cellphone to his old friend from high school (Carver High, Class of 1967), Jack Callahan about how his grandson, Brandon, the oldest grandson of his daughter Janice from his first marriage (first of three all ending in divorce but that is merely a figure for the Census Bureau and not germane to what follows so enough) had beguiled him recently with his arcane knowledge of classical jazz (the jazz from the age of King Oliver say until the death of the big bad swings bands which died in the late 1940s for the most part giving way to cool ass be-bop and what followed).


Jack braced himself for the deluge, got very quiet and did not say word one, since lately the minute Sam mentioned, maybe even thought about mentioning the slightest thing connected with jazz he knew he was in for it, in for a harangue of unknown duration on the subject. Sam, recently more conscious that Jack, who hated jazz, hated it worse when as a child of rock and roll as Sam was, his father would endlessly play Count this, King that, Duke the other thing and not allow the family record player centered in the family living room to be sullied (his father’s word) by heathen stuff like Roll Over Beethoven or One Night With You, would go silent at the word “jazz” said not to worry he would only say a few words from his conversation with Brandon:        

No, Jack, my man, this will not be a screed about how back in the day, back in the 1950s the time of our complete absorption into rock and roll, when be-bop jazz was the cat’s meow, when cool was listening to the Monk trip up a note, consciously trip up a note to see if anybody caught it and then took that note to heaven and back, and worked it out from there or Dizzy burping then hitting the high white note all those guys were struggling against the limits of the instruments to get, high as hell on tea, you know what we called ganja, herb, stuff like that.


Frankly I was too young, you too but I knew how you felt since I couldn’t listen to rock in my house either as the 1940s Andrews Sisters/Perry Como/Frank Sinatra/Peggy Lee cabal were front and center in our living room and I was reduced to listening on my transistor radio, way too young to appreciate such work then and I only got the tail end, you know when Hollywood or the popular prints messed the whole be-bop jazz “beat” thing up and we got spoon-fed Maynard G. Krebs faux black and white television beatnik selling hair cream oil or something like that, and ten thousand guys hanging around the Village on Saturday night in full beret and whatever they could put together for a beard from the outreaches of Tenafly, New Jersey (sorry but Fort Lee was out) and another ten thousand gals, all in black from head to toe, maybe black underwear too so something to imagine at least from Norwalk, Connecticut milling around as well. Square, square cubed.



No, this will not be some screed going back further in the hard times of the Great Depression and the slogging through World War II when “it did not mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing” when our parents, the parents of the kids who caught the end of be-bop “swang,” did dips and twirls to counts, dukes, earls, princes, marquises even leading big band splashes to wash that generation clean. Come on now that was our parents and I wasn’t even born so no way I can “screed” about that. And, no, no, big time no, this will not be about some solitary figure in some dank, dusty, smoke-filled café, the booze flowing, the dope in the back alleys inflaming the night while some guy, probably a sexy sax player, blows some eternal high white note out against some bay, maybe Frisco Bay, and I was hooked, hooked for life on the be-bop jazz scene.

No, it never even came close to starting out like that, never even dreamed such scenes. Unlike rock and roll, the classic kind that was produced in our 1950s growing up time and which we have had a life-long devotion to or folk music which I came of age, political and social age to, later in the early 1960s, jazz was a late, a very late acquisition to my understanding of the American songbook. Oh sure I would hear a phrase, a few bing, bang, bong notes blowing out the window, out the door, sitting in some bar over drinks with some hot date, maybe hear it as backdrop in some Harvard Square bookstore when I went looking for books (and, once somebody hipped me to the scene, looking for bright young women who also were in the bookstore looking for books, and bright young men were looking for them but that scene is best left for another time), or at some party when the host tired of playing old-time folk music had decided to kick out the jams and let the jazz boys wreak their havoc. But jazz was, and to a great extent still is, a side bar of my musical tastes.          

About a decade ago, a little more, I got seriously into jazz for a while. The reason: the centennial of the birth of Duke Ellington being celebrated when I was listening to some radio show which was commemorating that fact and I heard a few faint bars which required me to both turn up the volume and to listen to the rest of the one hour tribute. The show played a lot of Duke’s stuff from the early 1940s when he had Ben Webster, Harry Carney, and Johnny Hodges on board. The stuff blew me away and as is my wont when I get my enthusiasms up, when something blows me away, I grabbed everything by the Duke and his various groupings and marveled at how very good his work was, how his tonal poems reached deep, deep down and caught something in me that responded in kind. Especially when those sexy saxs, when Johnny or Cootie blew me away if they let it all hang out.

Funny though I thought at the time that I hadn’t picked up on this sound before, this reaching for the soul, for the essence of the matter, since there are very definitely elements of the blues in Brother Duke’s work. And I have been nothing but a stone blown blues freak since the early 1960s when I first heard Howlin’ Wolf hold forth practically eating that harmonica of his on Little Red Rooster and Smokestack Lightnin’. Moreover I had always been a Billie Holiday fan although I never drew the connection to the jazz in the background since it usually was muted to let her rip with that throaty sultry voice, the voice that chased the blues, my blues, away.

So, yes, count me among the guys who are searching for the guys who are searching for the great big cloud puff high white note, guys who have been searching for a long time as the notes waft out into the deep blue sea night. Check this out. Blowing that high white note out into the surly choppy Japan deep blue seas foaming and slashing out into the bay the one time I was sitting in fog-bound Frisco town, sitting around a North Beach bar, the High Hat maybe, back when Jimmy La Croix ran the place and a guy with a story, or a guy he knew could run a tab, for a while, and then settle up or let the hammer fall and you would wind up cadging swigs from flea-bitten raggedy- assed winos and sterno bums.

On Monday nights, a slow night in every venue you can name except maybe whorehouses and even then the business would  fall off only a little since guys had to see their wives or girlfriends or both sometime, Jimmy would hold what is now called an “open mic” but then, I forget, maybe talent search something like that but the same thing. The “Hat” as everybody called it was known far and wide by ex hep-cats, aging beats, and faded flower child ex-hippies who had not yet got back to the “real” world once those trends petered out but were still looking, as I was, looking for something and got a little solace from the bottle and a dark place to nurse the damn thing where you could be social or just hang out was the place around North Beach where young talent took to the boards. Played, played for the “basket” just like the folkies used to do back in the 1960s when that genre had its heyday, and probably get a few dollars from the mostly regular heavy drinker crowd that populate any gin mill on Monday, whether they have seen their loved ones or not.


Jimmy would have Max Jenny on drums and Milt Bogan on that big old bass that took up half the stage, if you remember those guys when West Coast jazz was big, to back-up the talent so this was serious stuff, at least Jimmy played it that way.
 

Most of the stuff early on that night was so-so some riffs stolen from more famous guys like Miles Davis, Dizzie, Coltrane, the cool ass jazz from the fifties that young bud talent imitates starting out, maybe gets stuck on those covers and wind up, addled by some sister habit, down by the trolley trains on Market Street hustling dollars from weary tourists waiting to get up the damn hill. So nothing that would keep a steady drinker, me, from steady drinking in those days when I lifted low-shelf whiskeys with abandon. Maybe half a dozen other guys spread out around bar to prove they were there strictly for the drinking and chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes to fill up Jimmy’s ashtrays and give Red the bartender something to do between pouring shots (otherwise the guys hungry for women company would be bunched near the dance floor but they must have had it bad since Monday night the serious honeys were not at the “Hat” but home getting rested up for the long week ahead of fending guys off).
 

Then I turned around toward the stage, turned around for no particular reason, certainly not to pay attention to the talent, when this young guy, young black guy, barely out of his teens, maybe sixteen for all I know and snuck out of the house to play, Jimmy wasn’t taking ID cards in those days and if the kid wasn’t drinking then what did it matter, to get play to reach the stars if that is what he wanted, slim a reed, dressed kind of haphazardly with a shiny suit that he probably wore to church with grandmother, string tie, clean shirt, couldn’t see his feet so can’t comment on that, maybe a little from hunger, or had the hunger eating him up. Kind of an unusual sight for ‘90s Frisco outside of the missions. But figure this, figure his eyes, eyes that I know about from my own bouts with sister, with the just forming sad sack yellow eyes of high king hell dope-dom and it all fit.

The kid was ready though to blow a big sexy tenor sax, a sax as big as he was, certainly fatter, blew the hell out of one note after another once he got his bearings, then paused, paused to suck up the universe of the smoke filled air in the place (a whiff of ganja from the back somewhere from some guy Jimmy must have known since usually dope in the place was a no-no), and went over to the river Jordan for a minute, rested, came back with a big blow that would get at least to Hawaii, rested again, maybe just a little uncertain where to go like kids always are, copy some somebody and let it go at that for the Monday crowd or blast away, but even I sensed that he had something going, so blew up a big cloud puff riff alternating with pauses hard to do, went at it again this time to the corner of paradise.


Stopped then, I thought he was done, he looked to hell like he was done, done in eyes almost closed, and then onward, a big beautiful dah, dee, dah, dee, dah, dee, blow, a “max daddy” blow then even an old chattering wino in a booth stopped to wonder at, and that big high white note went ripping down Bay Street, I swear I could see it, on into the fog-bound bay and on its way, not stopping until Edo, hell maybe back to Mother Africa where it all started.  He had it, that it means only “it” and if he never blew again he had that “it” moment. He left out the back door and I never saw him at the “Hat” again so maybe he was down on Mission or maybe he went somewhere, got some steady work. All I know was that I was there when a guy blew that high white note, yeah, that high white note. So yeah count me too among Duke’s boys, down at Duke’s place where he eternally searched for that elusive high white note.

See I didn’t take too long, right.             

*From The Be-Bop Night -The 'Real' Scoop on "Tri-Hi-Y"- An Investigatory Report- "Inside Edition" Move On Over


Click on link to a "YouTube" film Club of the modern doings of one school's Tri-Hi-Y Club. Hey, don't shoot the messenger on this one. I just like to provide a relevant link with my posts</strong>



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ycmi8IIUBq4




Josh Breslin comment:





Today I have my investigative reporter's hat on. This is intended to be a light-hearted look at an old school organization. But I have a lawyer in the wings just in case.


Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. That was good, if unheeded, advice a few thousand years ago. Apparently it is advice that we should have also heeded back in our school days. The subject today is the mysterious, seemingly nefarious, doings of Tri Kappa Phi, colloquially known as Tri-Hi-Y. (I have, as yet, been unable to untangle the relationship between these two names but I suspect the latter is merely a classic front name.) Ostensibly this was a girls' club devoted to public service. Or, at least, that is what they would have us believe. However a glance at page 17 of the 1964 "Manet" belies that story.


According to their own words this organization was committed to furthering "pure thoughts, pure words, and pure actions" among the members. This, my friends, reads, to these old eyes at least, more like the program for the vestal virgins in the temples of pagan Greece than a program for a society then on the edge of a sexual revolution. That should have been the tip-off. Now we live in a more skeptical age and would have had our antennae out when confronted with such shameless hyperbole. Then, naïve as we were, we bought the story hook, line and sinker.


Look, I am a fair person, or try to be. In order to get a grasp on this unfolding story and learn more about the group I, innocently, e-mailed the president of the organization in 1964. Result- Nada, a resounding no reply. I then pursued another avenue that I thought might be more fruitful. I e-mailed the chaplain of the group in her junior and senior year on the North Quincy Alumni site. Now she is not just any fellow classmate but currently the secretary to the headmaster at North Quincy High. Dear readers, she has access to the records!


I, good-heartedly, offered this ex-chaplain the opportunity to place our correspondence under a confidential attorney-client blanket. I further suggested that she might fall under priest- penitent immunity provisions concerning her testimony. Result - Stonewalled, no reply. Apparently, this is one secretary that went to the infamous Richard M. Nixon, ex-President and all-around thug who started the Rosemary Woods Secretarial School for stonewalling missing tapes. Moreover, another closer look at the "Manet" told the tale. The winsome smile and twinkle in her eye of her class picture on page 117 did not jibe with her Cotton Mather-like visage on page 17. I then determined that I needed to investigate this matter further.


Right now, I admit, there are more questions than answers. Little did this pair and their accomplices know that some fifty years later an intrepid alumnus with some time on his hands was going to fall onto their little threadbare operation. I will continue to try to unravel this tangled story to the bitter end.


Here are some questions that I have right now though that you, my friends, can help me with. Why did a so-called 'public service' group in a democratic, secular institution need a chaplain? What deep, dark secrets were being kept from us? Moreover, apparently, from the lack of response to my inquiries, members are sworn to secrecy unto the grave. Why? And here is another little tidbit to feast on. Why was the turnover rate in the organization so high, especially in senior year? Was it impossible to keep to the public "3 purities" slogan mentioned above with a straight face or did a number of members fall afoul of the cabal at the top? Are there any whistle-blowers out there? More later. Tri-Hi-Y, indeed!

Out In The Be-Bop Night-The Bard Of 1964?- Muse Jack Kerouac Where Are You?

Josh Breslin, Class Of 1964, comment:





Recently someone from our class, who shall remain nameless, wrote an e-mail, a friendly e-mail I assume, asking me if I, with this never-ending (my word) stream of messages, was trying to be the bard (her word, oops) of the Class of 1964. I rapidly replied with this short answer- “What, are you kidding?” Later though, after I thought about it for a while, I realized that I did mean to be ONE of the latter-day sainted voices of the class.


Why? I have, with all due modesty, the perfect resume for the job.


Here it is:



I belonged to no clubs, not even after school ones. I played no major sport that drove a lot of the social networking of the time (I am being polite here: this is a family-friendly site after all). The sports that did drive me throughout my high school career, track and cross-country, were then very marginal sports for “nerds” and other assorted odd-balls cluttering up the highways and by-ways of the town blocking traffic and getting catcalls from the citizenry and that was just the guys, the girls were merciless, "fag" baiting us to perdition. I was, moreover, overwhelmingly underwhelming at them, to boot. I did not hang around with the class intellectuals, although I was as obsessed and driven by books, ideas and theories as anyone else at the time, maybe more so. I was, to be polite again, painfully shy around girls and therefore somewhat socially backward, although I was furtively enthralled by more than one of them. Girls, that is And to top it all off, to use a term that I think truly describes me then, I was something of a ragamuffin from the town's wrong side of the tracks.


Oh, did I mentioned that I was also so alienated from the old high school environment that I either threw, or threatened to throw, my yearbook in the nearest river right after graduation; in any case I no longer have it.



Perfect, right? No. Not complete enough? Well how about this. My family, on my mother’s side, had been in the old town since about the time of the “famine ships” from Ireland. I have not gotten that far back in the genealogy but way back someone in the family was a servant of some sort, to one of the branches of the presidential Adams family. Most of my relatives distance and far, went through the old high school. The streets of the old town were filled with the remnants of the clan. My friends, deny it or nor, the diaspora "old sod" of North Quincy was in the blood. How else explain, after a forty year hiatus, this overweening desire to write about the “Dust Bowl” that served as a training track during my running days. Or the oddness of separate boys and girls bowling teams, as if social contact in that endeavor would lead to .....whatever.


Or that mysterious “Tri-Hi-Y” (a harmless social organization for women students that I have skewered for its virginal aspirations). Or the million other things that pop into my head there days. Oh ya, I can write, a little. Not unimportant for a bard, right? The soul of a poet, if not the language. Time and technology has given us an exceptional opportunity to tell our story and seek immortality and I want in on that. Old Walt Whitman can sing of America, I will sing of the old town, gladly.



Well, do I get a job? Hey, you can always “fire” me. Just “click” and move on.

Take Your Baby To The Carnival On A Saturday Night-Adventureland (2009)-A Film Review 

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Adventureland, starring Kristie Stewart, Jesse Eisenberg, 2009

Not every film by this reviewer has to have a serious social message (although it helps) or be so gripping that he had to see the thing over and over again as it becomes one of filmdom’s classic pieces like Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes, and the film under review Adventureland exactly fits this category, he just needs film to ward of the willies. Usually a comedy of some sort will fill the bill and in this case it is a romantic comedy that has calmed his nerves.     

No question it never hurts that the locale of this comedy was located in Adventureland, in an amusement park, run down though it might be, since he has been enthralled by the “magic” of the neon lights and its swarm of grifters, drifters, goofs and midnight sifters at amusement parks and carnivals since early childhood. Still does consider himself an above average hand at Skee and its coupon-laden kewpie doll prizes. Actually, and he has written about the fact elsewhere, had run away with the carnival for a couple of days in his youth before being reined in by fearful and angry parents. So he has a pedigree of sorts in what the lure of the bright lights, tumultuous array of sounds, and smells from hot dogs to cotton candy brings to the even the normally sedate.   

Of course the amusement park motif is just so much backdrop for the real boy-meets-girl angle behind this and more than half the films ever created. Here’s the play. James, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is an aspiring graduate student, Columbia School of Journalism no less, with downwardly mobile parents who cannot afford to spring for a promised  grand tour of Europe and hence the summer job at Adventureland, the fate of many liberal arts graduates of late. As he gets the hang of the job after about two minutes, basically as long as it takes a co-worker to fill him of the grift, the scams that make the suckers pay for cheapjack stuff and like it, he becomes friendly with plenty of the co-workers. The usual cross-section of guys and gals who work the carny/theme park scene down at the edges of society.       

One of those co-workers, Emily, played by fetching Kristie Stewart last seen in this space working her magic on the guys who played Neal Cassady and Jack Kerouac in the film adaptation of the latter’s On The Road, catches his eye and we are off to the races. Naturally it would be a very short film if the obvious attraction they had for each other had them immediately go off into the blissful sunset. Problem number one was that James was by choice, by discriminating choice, if you can believe this in this day in age, a virgin and was not sure whether he wanted to commit to Emily and wind up “doing the do” with her, a sexually experienced woman. Problem number two alienated from her parents Emily was in a hush-hush sexual relationship with the park’s married handyman. Don’t worry because in the end after some serious talking and smoking some serious weed they do wind up going hand and hand into the sunset, wind up “doing the do.”         

By the way it never hurts either in a film on youthful confusion about life to have a soundtrack that features the late Lou Reed’s Pale Blue Eyes and other songs done with the Velvet Underground.